The Devil, or as he is known by Dante, Lucifer ("bringer of Light") is always the most interesting man in the room when he is in the room, which if more often thank you'd expect. Tim Pratt is a writer equally welcomed by the literary world and the genre fiction world, and that gives him a reason to put together one of the most interesting collections of stories you're going to find thus far this year. 'Sympathy for the Devil' isn't just a gathering of genre fiction favorites, but a book you could legitimately use as a textbook for a college English course. It's thorough and literary, and all the more entertaining as a result.
Now, you will find a great selection of top-notch fiction in this book, including some hard-to-stuff that might be worth the price of admission alone. For that, go not father than Jonathan Carroll's "The Heidelberg Cylinder," with one of the weirdest and most unsettling evocations of Satan you're likely, or rather unlikely to encounter. Previously available only in a very limited edition, this story justifies the cover price. But there's a lot more in the genre vein, including Jeffrey Ford, two by Neil Gaiman, Andy Duncan's "Beluthahatchie," "Snowball's Chance" by Charles Stross, "The Goat Cutter:" by Jay Lake and "Details" by China Miéville. This is a partial list of what's there and a list that again, alone, makes the collection buy-worthy.
John Collier and Michael Chabon front the modern literary contingent. But for this reader, the ties that bin, the stories that take this collection to a higher level are those from history. If you've never read Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Young Goodman Browne" is the first step down a path of addiction. Hawthorne is a masterful writer and there's a Lovevraftian sense of menace here that is chillingly palpable. And the collection ends with the best, the first, the only — Dante Alighieri, Canto XXXIV of The Inferno.
Here is a glimpse of why to this day, we are ever fascinated with evil. This is the abyss that looks back into you, and this is the monster you hunter that turns you into a monster. It's important, I think to note the title of the collection is evokes sympathy, not empathy. If we feel sorry for the Devil, we may understand him, but still feel superior. Empathy for the Devil is a bit more dangerous. I won't call this collection a mirror; that's for you to experience. We might only know we have a soul after we have sold it.
08-31-10:Peter S. Beagle Reveals 'The Secret History of Fantasy'
Telling Lies for a Living
Peter S. Beagle doesn't mince any words in 'The Secret History of Fantasy,' (Tachyon ; July 22, 2010 ; $15.95) which begins: "I have written elsewhere that there was a time when all literature was called fantasy."
This is an important point, which I have heard expressed many ways. Laurie R. King is always reminding me that writers lie for a living. I think I prefer the term fantasy, but you get the point.
They're all making this stuff up.
But fiction that falls under the rubric of "fantasy" is too often seen as consisting only of the xth iteration of 'Lord of the Rings'-style fantasy adventure. Beagle knows that there is more to it than this. He not only wrote the introduction to the original Bantam Paperback publication of LOTR, he also wrote a classic anti-fantasy fantasy himself, 'The Last Unicorn.' Ah, would but that were to have been true!
In some ways, you can look at 'The Secret History of Fantasy' as absolutely, without-a-doubt, the best textbook you could ever hope to have assigned to you. I'm recommending that you assign it to yourself, and studying will be a pleasure as you enjoy not only Beagle's insightful and concise opening essay, but as well the nineteen stories that follow, and the two essays that complete the collection. Beagle has set out to rewrite our concept of fantasy, and with the help of some of the world's best writers, succeeds admirably. There's a good reason that the cover illustration is an upside-down dragon.
'The Secret History of Fantasy,' through Beagle's canny story selection, offers a vision of "fantasy fiction" as much more than mere guys-on-a-quest fiction. With writers like T. C. Boyle and Yann Martel set alongside Stephen King and Neil Gaiman, it's much easier to understand that fantasy fiction simply involves an element of the imagination, not a secondary world-setting with magic and critters.
Beagle's selections emphasize the imaginative, with works like Jeffrey Ford's "The Emperor of Ice Cream" and Stephen Millhauser's "The Barnum Museum." None of the titles are new, but the placement together is new. Juxtaposition is everything.
Beagle does an outstanding job at bringing together writers from both inside and outside genre fiction, so the chances are that readers on any side of the equation are going to find the unfamiliar, and of course, that is the point. The cultural dominance and penetration of Tolkien's seminal work has actually done a fair amount of harm to the term fantasy fiction. It has become the de-facto definition of fantasy, and Beagle is here to show us that fantasy is not the familiar, men-on-horses quest story, but instead, true stories of what is in the human heart.
The two essays — by David G. Hartwell and Ursula Le Guin — that complete the volume offer a more formal vision of fantasy fiction, and a scholarly approach that is engaging because the subject itself is engaging. Le Guin is very funny as she talks about the genre she helped to shape, and Hartwell offer a pocket literary history of how we got to this point. Together, their non-fiction casts a very different light on the fiction that it follows.
We are not rational beings and our hearts and feelings do not operate by the rules of logic. Fantasy fiction is indeed the best means of externalizing our emotions and capturing them in stories so that we can get of grip on who we really are. The history of fantasy may indeed be a secret, but our hearts need not be.
The equivalence between pictures and words is greatly overstated. There is no measure in one to capture the other. A single sentence can conjure endless images and conversely, there are images that no words can corral. For longer than many could imagine, David Doubilet has been capturing such images — under the water.
Doubilet has been paid for his underwater photographs since he was fifteen years old, and in that span of time he has learned to capture more than mere imagery. When I asked to speak to him for the Blue Ocean Film Festival, I asked to see some his books, and he sent 'Water Light Time' (Phaidon Press ; March 15, 2006 ; $29.95), 'Fish Face' (Phaidon Press ; November 1, 2003 ; $19.95) and 'Face to Face With Sharks,' co-written by Jennifer Hayes (National Geographic Children's Books ; February 10, 2009 ; $16.95). They were rather shocked I even asked, but I'm certain much less so than I was stunned by the imagery I found within.
For a book that you can spend endless hours literally immersed in, nothing can beat 'Water Light Time,' which instantly reminded me of two other books in my library, boith different from one another and from Doubilet's masterpiece. (And it is a masterpiece, make no mistake.) Readers probably have not heard much about my art-book buying career, but I do have some, and one of my favorites is Andy Goldsworthy's book, 'Time,' and Andrey Tarkovsky's 'Sculpting in Time.' The titles are the giveaway, but the common thread is clear in the imagery of each artist. There is a sense of time in these images that Doubilet captures; in fact there are many senses of time to be found in this remarkable collection.
Photography by definition captures a single moment. But Doubilet's works, not surprisingly, since he is an underwater photographer, capture a flow of time as well. We can feel the moment before and after these images, and in fact, the millennia that went into the creation of the images. In 'Water Light Time,' you'll find a variety of imagery, from portraits of fish (these are the sole province of 'Fish Face') to painterly images that almost defy the viewer to believe that they could have been photographed.
Doubilet is a master of underwater photography, but the technical expertise that certainly went into the creation of these images is by and large not on display, or, I suppose, not really assertively a part of the composition. Instead, Doubilet manages to create indelible visions that, by virtue of composition, color and reproduction literally immerse the reader in the ocean, in ways we have not experienced before. His half-and-half shots are the most striking example of this, but there are many others that do so as well; sharks streaming by the camera with remoras clinging to their side seem almost impressionistically rendered. You'll see this technique in his photos of squid as well.
But Doubilet is also quite handily capable of photographing creatures we've seen with a precision and accuracy that is clearly of scientific as well as artistic value. 'Fish Face' is the ultimate example of this, while 'Face to Face With Sharks' offers more action=-packed fare for younger readers. Of course the latter might give these same readers nightmares, or at least inspire second thoughts before plunging into the open ocean.
Doubilet's work is nothing short of art, nothing short of the finest prose fiction you can read. How many libraries are there in 'Water Light Time'? How many novels? There is at least one story per page. But there is no equivalent for any of these images; no words will suffice or summarize. You can only enter the flow, and emerge, speechless wordless, immersed.
New to the Agony Column
09-01-10: Commentary : Tim Pratt Finds 'Sympathy for the Devil' : "...Hell for the company..."
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview with Dan Basta at the Blue Ocean Film Festival : "Experiential learning is the way we learn best."
08-31-10: Commentary : Peter S. Beagle Reveals 'The Secret History of Fantasy' : : Telling Lies for a Living
08-30-10: Commentary : David Doubilet Captures 'Water Time Light' : Painting with Pixels
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview With David Doubilet and Jennifer Hayes : "Everything people have always feared about photography comes true underwater."
08-25-10: Commentary : Vendela Vida 'The Lovers' : Reading and Revelation
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A Live Reading and Interview with Vendela Vida At Bookshop Santa Cruz : "...there was an owl that came into this place we were renting one day..."
08-24-10: Commentary : Jeff VanderMeer and 'The Third Bear' : Absurd Is as Absurd Does
08-20-10: Commentary : Joe R. Lansdale Takes 'Deadman's Road' : Deader Than Thou
Agony Column Podcast News Report : On the Phone with Vendela Vida : "You do all this background information, most of which never makes it into the book."
08-19-10: Commentary : Gary Shteyngart Tells a 'Super Sad True Love Story' : Retro-Prescience
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Gary Shteyngart Live Reading and Interview at Bookshop Santa Cruz : "...please like me, this will make up for Hebrew school if all of you like me.."
08-18-10: Commentary : Mark Pilkington Unleashes Weapons of Mass Deception : "ECM+CIA=UFO"
Agony Column Podcast News Report : David Corbett and Barry Eisler for The Agony Column Live at Capitola Book Café, August 7, 2010 Q and A : "This is NewSpeak."
08-16-10: Commentary : Howard Norman Asks 'What is Left the Daughter' : The Past Always Rises
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview with Howard Norman : "I'd wanted to write from the beginning an epistolary novel; this is just an epistolary novel that's consisting of one letter."
08-12-10: Commentary : James O'Neal Copies 'The Double Human' : Proceeding into the Future
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Barry Eisler and David Corbett Live at Capitola Book Café on August 7, 2010 : "If anyone thinks it's absurd that the government might assassinate the founder of WikiLeaks, it's quite a bit less absurd than I wish it were".... — Barry Eisler
08-11-10: Commentary : Joe R. Lansdale Takes Huck Finn to 'Dread Island' : "Classics Mutilated"
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Barry Eisler Reads at The Agony Column Live on August 7, 2010 : "...they'll pick up that angle and run interference for us..."
08-10-10: Commentary : David Corbett Asks 'Do They Know I'm Running?' : Crossing Borders
Agony Column Podcast News Report : David Corbett Reads at The Agony Column Live on August 7, 2010 : "These Families are making incredible sacrifices..."
08-09-10: Commentary : David Mitchell and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet : The World is Ever the World
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview with David Mitchell : "The periodic table of the human heart is still the same now as it was then."
08-06-10: Commentary : Tim Powers Sails 'On Stranger Tides' : History, Fantasy and the Reality of Reading
08-03-10: Commentary : Robert M. Price Spins 'The Tindalos Cycle' : Terrorize, Horrify, Repeat
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A Short Chat with Gary Shteyngart : "...the technology is outpacing our ability to absorb what it is doing to us..."
08-02-10: Commentary : A Second Tour Through 'The Passage' : Sending Characters into Time
07-30-10: Commentary : Subterranean Press and Robert R. McCammon Wake at 'The Wolf's Hour' : The Time Before Cheese
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Three Books with Alan Cheuse : Allegra Goodman, 'The Cookbook Collector,' Noam Shpancer's 'The Good Psychologist' and Elie Wiesel 'The Sonderberg Case'
07-28-10: Commentary : Rule Britannia, In Space 2 : En Route, RJ Frith and Peter F. Hamilton
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Brian and Wendy Froud at SF in SF on Monday, July 19, 2010: Q & A : "The people you deal with at the publishers ... if they last the end of the week, you're lucky."
07-27-10: Commentary : Rule Britannia, In Space : UK Space Opera Demonstrates Excess is Not Enough (Part one, the Arrived)
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Brian and Wendy Froud at SF in SF on Monday, July 19, 2010 : "Well, I thought if I do faeries then nobody's going to say that I've got it wrong."
07-26-10: Commentary : Brian and Wendy Froud Seek 'The Heart of Faerie Oracle' : Cards, Books and a New Perspective
